ABSTRACT
Social policy on mental health has been concerned more with mental illness, its management, amelioration and prevention than with mental health. Mental health policy is new and relatively uncharted territory. Developing the ground defined in Part I, this chapter brings together disparate elements of policies and strategies in mental health promotion (MHP), describes them with reference to examples of good practice, and suggests a progressive and reflexive interrelationship between them. In doing so, it inevitably draws on policies and strategies concerned with mental illness and with secondary and tertiary prevention. My own strategy in drawing on such sources is to locate MHP within existing international, national and local governmental legislation, circulars, guidelines, policies, etc. in order to claim some ground for MHP whilst offering a critique of the limitiations of existing mental illness policy. It is for this reason that the chapter is titled mental health policy, in the Italian sense in which la politico means politics, policy and political action. Thus, mental health policy includes macro politics, their implementation (through policy), as well as the (political) action necessary to implement policy.
